A view from the clouds: Cloud computing for developers

One of the things that often comes up at some point in IBM Workload Deployer conversations is the notion of self-service access. Specifically, users want to know what the appliance provides that enables them to allow various teams in their organization to directly deploy the middleware environments they need. In other words, they want to use IBM Workload Deployer to tear down the traditional barriers that exist between those that request the environment and those that fulfill said request. Now, as we begin to elaborate on this notion, it becomes quickly apparent that in order to effectively enable self-service, IBM Workload Deployer must deliver a few things.

First, IBM Workload Deployer must provide the means to define users with various levels of access. Second, IBM Workload Deployer must provide the means to define resource access at a fine-grained level to different users and groups of users. Check and check. The appliance has been doing this since the beginning of WebSphere CloudBurst. Without those two things, the conversation of self-service access would end pretty quickly. However, there is a final capability that is equally important: IBM Workload Deployer must deliver a means to limit resource consumption at a fine-grained level.

In IBM Workload Deployer there are a couple of ways to achieve this. First, you could define multiple cloud groups and allow access to those groups in a way that maps directly to resource entitlements. While that may work in some situations, others call for even more granularity. You may want to allow multiple different users or groups to access a cloud group, but you may want to allow different consumption limits for each of these groups. In this situation, you can take advantage of environment profiles and a new option when defining users of IBM Workload Deployer.

Consider the case that you have a group of developers and you want to limit their consumption of memory in the cloud. First, you start by defining your development users and for each you select Environment Profile Only as the value for the Deployment Options field.

By selecting the above value for the deployment options of a user, you restrict that user to only deploying via an environment profile as opposed to general cloud group deployments. After defining all of your development users, you may choose to organize them into a user group for easier management. At that point, you can define environment profiles and determine which ones your developers should have access to using the Access granted to field of the profile.

Within the environment profile, you can define resource consumption limits for compute resource and software licenses. For instance, you can define a limit on the amount of virtual memory consumed by all deployments using the profile. It is important to note that the limit is cumulative for ALL deployments that use the profile.

Now that all of the controls are in place, consider the deployment process for one of your development users. They pick a virtual system pattern, click the deploy icon and begin to configure the pattern for deployment. In the Choose Environment section of the deployment dialog, your development user will only be able to select the Choose profile option for deployment. Further, they will only be able to deploy using the environment profiles to which they have access.

After the deployment completes, a look at the Environment limits section in the profile shows the current usage totals.

Now suppose another development user, or even the same one, comes along and attempts to deploy another virtual system pattern even though the profile limits have already been reached. The user can initiate the deployment, but they will get a near immediate failure owing to the fact that they would exceed consumption limits if the deployment were allowed to proceed.

The same kind of enforcement occurs regardless of the resource limit type. You can use this approach to limit the consumption of CPU, virtual memory, storage, or software licenses among the various different users or groups of users you define in IBM Workload Deployer. If you combine fine-grained resource consumption limits with varying permissions and fine-grained access, I think you are on the road to truly enabling self-service in the enterprise.

Script packages are an integral part of virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. By attaching script packages to your patterns, you provide customizations particular to your unique cloud-based middleware environments. Customizations provided by script packages might include installing applications, creating application resources, integrating with external enterprise systems, and much more. The bottom line is, if you are creating virtual system patterns, you will almost certainly be creating script packages.

Largely, the act of creating a script package is independent of IBM Workload Deployer. The appliance does not dictate a particular scripting language, so all you need to do is make sure you can invoke your logic in the operating system environment. Your script package may be a wsadmin script, shell script, Java program, Perl script, and on and on. After you create the actual contents of your script package, you will then load that asset into the IBM Workload Deployer catalog.

Once loaded into the catalog, you define several attributes of your script package, including the executable command, command arguments, variables, execution time, and more. The process for defining these attributes is trivial using the intuitive UI in IBM Workload Deployer, but I wanted to take a little time to remind you of a technique I recommend to all users defining script packages. You can actually package a JSON file within the script package that defines all of the script's attributes. The format of the file is simple, and I am including an example below:

The example above is one taken from a script package in our samples gallery, and it shows the basics of which you need to be aware. Notice that in the JSON file, you can provide a name, description, unzip location, executable command, command arguments, variables, and more. You only need to ensure that the name of this JSON file is cbscript.json and that you include it at the root of the script package archive. Once you have done that, you load the script package archive into the catalog, refresh the script package details, and voila -- all the attribute definitions appear!

You may ask why I recommend this since it could seem like an unnecessary step. My answer to that is that you have to define these attributes anyway, so you might as well capture it once in the file. Once you capture it once in the file, you can ensure that if the same script needs to be reloaded, or if you need to move it to another appliance, its definition will be exactly the same (and presumably correct). I use this approach for all of my work, and for all of the samples I contribute to our gallery, and it really saves me a lot of misplaced effort that can result from typos. If you are out there creating script packages, try adopting this approach. I'm pretty sure you will be happy you did!

Sorry for the late notice - but I just realized that I hadn't blogged about a webcast that I am participating in tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/13)!

Chris Brealey (a Senior Technical Staff Member and Rational Enterprise Architect) and I are hosting an InformationWeek WebCast tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/13) entitled "Quickly and Efficiently Design, Develop, Deploy, and Test Workload Application Patterns to Save Months and Millions". I encourage you to register now for this free event (or if you can't make it tomorrow listen to it at your convenience as it will be recorded ... but you still need to register).

I'm really looking forward to this webcast. IBM Workload Deployer's predecessor, WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance, delivered unmatched capabilities for middleware deployments and management using Virtual System patterns (topology) - delivering complete middleware topologies in a rapid, consistent, and repeatable fashion. This has greatly improved the ability of development and test organizations to meet the ever increasing demands of today's agile development processes in addition to the assurance it provides for production environments. All of that value is still present (and improved) in IBM Workload Deployer but there is even more value in the new Virtual Application Patterns, as we've mentioned in previous posts.

Virtual Applications build upon this same notion of consistency and speed found in Virtual Systems while at the same time introducing a radical simplification to hosting your applications. Using an application-centric, declarative approach with Virtual Applications (workloads) it is even easier to deliver your applications rapidly leaving Workload Deployer to ensure the middleware environment is constructed and optimized to meet your application criteria. Virtual Applications usher IBM Workload Deployer into the realm of Platform-as-a-Service ... with even greater simplicity and agility to host your application in the most efficient fashion. As with Virtual System patterns earlier, we expect the introduction of Virtual Applications to continue to improve the dev/test lifecycle as well as production. The robust capabilities of Rational Application Developer and the simplicity of Virtual Application patterns in Workload Deployer make for a great combination.

I will start off the webcast with a discussion of PaaS and IBM Workload Deployer Virtual Application patterns. Chris will then discuss the application development process and how that is influenced with the introduction of the cloud environment. Chris will then explore the integration that is available in Rational Application Developer for IBM Workload Deployer. Finally, we will walk through a scenario that demonstrates how to leverage Virtual Application patterns in IBM Workload Deployer to design a solution that is then shared with the developer. Using Rational Application Developer the developer delivers the application into the pattern and moves it to test and finally pre-production. We will end with a question and answer time. I hope you can join us as we explore how we can use these technologies to increase agility and efficiency.

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly though, I was reminded of something that is probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time soon.

Based on this, and some of the other things I heard at the show, I decided to catch up with fellow IBMer Marc Haberkorn. Marc is an IBM Product Manager and is responsible for IBM Workload Deployer amongst other things. I asked him about IBM Workload Deployer, the competition, and cloud in general. Check out what Marc had to say below:

Me:IBM Workload Deployer is one among many of a growing wave of cloud management solutions. How do you differentiate the focus and business value of it versus the myriad of other solutions out there?

Marc: To sum it up, we offer a combination of depth and breadth. IWD delivers both workload aware management and general purpose management. Workload aware management differentiates IWD from its competition, as it can deliver more value for the set of products for which it has context. There is a set of actions that workload aware management tools can do that is normally left to the user by general purpose management tools. This list includes configuring a middleware server to know its hostname/IP address, configuring multiple middleware servers to know of one another, arranging clusters, applying maintenance, and handling elasticity. By handling more of these activities in the automated flow, there are fewer chances for manual errors and inconsistencies to enter a managed environment.

That said, without infinite resource or time, it’s impossible to deliver this context-aware management for everything under the sun. As such, in order to allow IWD to deliver differentiated value AND allow it to handle a customer's entire environment, we offer a mix of workload-aware management and general purpose management.

Me:VMware is a good example of a company active in the cloud space, and they seem to keep a consistent pace of new product delivery. What do you think of their product development focus?

Marc: I think VMware has built a very compelling set of capability in the virtualization space. I think the main difference between VMware's suite and IBM Workload Deployer is the perspective from which the environments are managed. VMware puts the administrator in the position of thinking about infrastructure from the ground up. The administrator is thinking about virtual images, hypervisors, and scripts. In IBM Workload Deployer, we think about things from the perspective of the app, because that's ultimately what the business cares about. By providing a declarative model through which an application can be instantiated and managed, we feel we deliver a deeper value proposition to clients, through workload-aware management.

Me:The 'one tool to do it all' approach is a popular, if not hard to achieve goal. What is your advice to users when it comes to choosing between breadth and depth for cloud management solutions?

Marc: The advantages of a "one tool to do it all" are many: less integration, more uniformity, less complexity. As such, customers will always prefer a single tool when possible. This is why IBM Workload Deployer has focused on not only providing differentiated, deeper value for common use cases but also providing a way to handle the "everything else." As such, my advice to users is not to choose between breadth and depth - use IBM Workload Deployer which offers both.

Me:To close, I'm curious to know where you think we are heading in the cloud market. What do you think users will be most readily adopting over the next one to two years? Where does the cloud industry need the most innovation?

Marc: I think most users are currently looking at the broad picture of cloud computing, and have been adopting primarily in the private cloud realm. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that many customers have a large set of hardware resources which amount to sunk cost that needs to be leveraged. Another reason is around data security concerns in off-premises clouds, and still another reason is around the human factor of comfort, which has taken time to develop around off-premise cloud models. However, businesses have become increasingly comfortable with various sources of outsourcing in recent years, especially in mission critical areas involving very sensitive data. Just look at IBM's Strategic Outsourcing business, which handles entire IT operations for many large businesses. I think that trend will (and really, has already begun to) continue in the area of cloud computing, and will lead to more public and ultimately hybrid cloud computing adoption. In order to get to hybrid cloud computing, I see much of the focus and innovation being associated with data security, workload portability (across private and public, in a seamless fashion), and license transferability between private and public. When this space reaches fruition, clients will be able to enjoy true elastic economics in a computing model that allows a mixture of owning and renting compute resources and software licenses.